


it feels so scary getting old

by viscrael



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Birthday Party, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pre-Slash, set post-returning to earth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-27
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-29 07:22:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15068063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viscrael/pseuds/viscrael
Summary: “I think being in space made everything different,” Lance said. “Other than the obvious stuff. I think it could’ve affected us…differently than we thought.”“How so?”“I never used to be uncomfortable with large, open spaces,” Lance said. “And the world wasn’t loud.”The world wasn’t loud.Keith couldn’t imagine that. Even if he’d never put a particular finger on it, the world had always been too loud to Keith, too much.But someone like Lance, who’d grown up with a huge family who had a huge presence and huge love to give, someone who’d spent most of his adolescence thriving off of other people, who used to pride himself on breaking hearts and finding his way around any social situation—Keith got why it was unsettling to him. He could get how that could be a sign of space changing him—this new, world-heavy Lance.“Maybe,” Keith said.





	it feels so scary getting old

**Author's Note:**

> im back with more small hurt/comf klance conversations bc i will never be over JUST how badly voltron doesnt want to address so many of the things that imo make it....most interesting
> 
> title from ribs by lorde bc that song makes me hurt physically

“Not enjoying the party?” Keith said as he sat down at the table next to Lance, a bowl of ice cream in his hand.

Lance looked up from his own dessert, raising his eyebrows in obvious surprise at Keith’s presence. “Hey,” he said. “What are you doing over here?”

“Just thought I’d join you.”

“Oh.” Lance’s gaze returned to his ice cream. It was pink-brown soup at this point. He swirled his spoon in the paste but never brought it up to his lips.

“It’s just—” Keith paused. Looked at his own ice cream, still solid but beginning to melt under the sun. “You looked lonely over here.”

“I guess sitting by myself away from everyone else will do that.” Lance gave a half-laugh like the noise had been aborted halfway out of his throat. “Just wanted to get away for a second, you know how it is.”

“Too much noise.”

“Way too much.” He smiled. “I mean, obviously I love being with my family and you guys and everything, and I can’t say I really _mind_ being the center of attention…”

“But it’s a lot,” Keith finished.

Lance nodded. He slid his spoon through the soup, leaving a line of white where the bottom of the ceramic bowl was visible.

A few yards in front of their table, Lance’s sister Veronica was having what appeared to be an intense discussion with Pidge and Hunk—potentially exchanging embarrassing stories about Lance, although Keith couldn’t quite tell. He inferred only from how willing Veronica seemed to give that information up when he briefly met her earlier and the fact that the three were laughing more than the average conversation warranted. They stood in a semi-circle under the shade of a tree, holding their own bowls of ice cream with spoons in their other hands.

Keith fidgeted where he sat at the wooden table, a good foot between him and Lance. Watching Pidge, Hunk, and Veronica as they stood around each other, Hunk touching Pidge’s shoulder every now and then in excitement, the tips of their shoes only a few inches apart from each other, made Keith uncomfortable aware of the body heat radiating off of Lance, even from here. Maybe it was his Galra senses, heightened over the past two years, making him so viscerally aware of Lance’s every movement and even his body temperature, or maybe it was just because Keith was nervous from being around so many strangers. Either way, he was thankful the ice cream gave him something to focus on.

“Do things ever feel like too much?” Lance asked.

Keith looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“You know.” He shrugged as if it were no big deal, but the tense in his shoulders and the methodic way he slid his spoon through his dessert told Keith a different story. “Just…when being around people feels like too much. And there’s too much noise. And everything starts to get fuzzy because it’s so much. Does that…happen to you?”

Keith thought about it. Somewhere in the park, one of Lance’s little brothers screamed at someone else to let him have a turn on the swing.

“Yeah,” he decided finally. “I guess it does sometimes. I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it like that, though.”

“But it does happen for you?”

“I guess. Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s just felt like…since we got back to Earth, I’ve been feeling like things are just kinda…overwhelming. Which is kind of weird for me, right?” He leaned his elbow on the table, his chin in the palm of his hand. “Like I’ve never really felt overwhelmed easily, and especially not by being around people. But it’s been loud lately. Too loud.”

Keith thought about the panic attacks he used to have as a child, right after his dad died. He thought about the way it felt, like the world was swallowing him whole.

“Is that why you sat over here alone?” he asked.

“Yeah. But don’t tell my mom.” Lance smiled like it was funny to him. “She’d get, like, _way_ worried about me if she knew, and she’s already worried enough as is because of the whole…you know. Voltron.”

And being gone three years, Keith wanted to say, but he didn’t. Something told him it wouldn’t be very productive.

“She just thinks I’m more tired than usual today because I woke up early to take Carlos to school for her. But I could probably tell her anything at this point and she’d just leave it alone.”

“Why?”

“She doesn’t want to rock the boat. I don’t know.” Again he shrugged. “She just doesn’t want to ask too many questions right now. I think she thinks I’m, like…”

“Fragile?”

“Yeah. Which is why I can’t tell her about the…you know. But I thought you might…”

He trailed off. The sentence was never finished, but Keith, like Lance’s mother, wasn’t sure how to push it. Now that Lance had pointed it out, he understood what it was about Lance that had been different since they’d returned to Earth a month ago—the way he’d been interacting with people. The small distance he’d started putting between him and others. The way he retreated from social events earlier than his norm. Knowing now that it was because of how loud the world was for Lance, he understood it.

He still didn’t quite understand _why_ the change had occurred, though. If it was only because they’d finally come home. If maybe it had occurred years ago when they were just starting out in space and Keith had just never noticed until now. He wasn’t sure. And he wasn’t sure how to ask.

The sun beat down on Keith’s back, harsh. Unlike Pidge, Hunk, and Veronica, he and Lance weren’t under the shade of a tree, the picnic table they’d chosen to sit at out in the wide open for the sun to get to them easily. Why Lance’s family had chosen to have his belated twentieth birthday at a park in the middle of August, Keith didn’t really know, but the McClains seemed to be enjoying themselves, siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents all present.

“I think being in space made everything different,” Lance said.

Keith frowned. “Well, yeah.”

“No, I mean, like—” He made some motion with his hand as if to help prove a point he hadn’t yet made. “Other than the obvious stuff. I think it could’ve affected us…differently than we thought.”

“How so?”

“I never used to be uncomfortable with large, open spaces,” Lance said. “And the world wasn’t loud.”

_The world wasn’t loud_. Keith couldn’t imagine that. Even if he’d never put a particular finger on it, the world had always been too loud to Keith, too much—even now, he could feel the pulsing of Lance’s heartbeat in his fingertips, in his wrists, his chest, through the bench. It was worse when he was younger.

But someone like Lance, who’d grown up with a huge family who had a huge presence and huge love to give, someone who’d spent most of his adolescence thriving off of other people, who used to pride himself on breaking hearts and finding his way around any social situation—Keith got why it was unsettling to him. He could get how that could be a sign of space changing him—this new, world-heavy Lance.

“Maybe,” Keith said. He looked at his feet through the crack between the table’s wood panels. At Lance’s, only a few inches away from his. He didn’t know when he’d fidgeted his way closer to Lance, or maybe it had been the other way around. Either way, they mimicked Hunk and Pidge now, the distance that of two people who were more familiar with each other.

Which—they were. They _were_ familiar with each other. There had been months, when Shiro was gone and Keith was forced into piloting the Black paladin, where that was all they were: _with_ each other. Lance, against all original expectations, had been Keith’s sense of stability for the months where his brother was gone, lost in space or in the enemy’s hands or dead. They’d…been there for each other. Gotten closer. Become each other’s confidants. Friends. For a moment, Keith thought they could’ve been…

But—whatever. It didn’t matter because then Keith left. And he was gone for two years. And in those years he’d missed the other paladins, but he’d learned to live without them, and he’d come back to some odd rift between the two, some weird distance he’d forgotten used to be there.

He missed when they were closer. When Lance was, apart from Shiro, Keith’s best friend.

They were this again. Feet apart. Scared of getting close. Or maybe just scare of acknowledging that they wanted to be.

“I think,” Keith said, watching the red of his shoe peak out between the table’s cracks, “that being in space and fighting a war away from your home for three years would have an effect on…anyone. Just different effects.”

“I guess that’s fair.” Keith felt Lance glance at him. “I got whatever the opposite of claustrophobia is and a new exhaustion with normal functions…and you got…buffer.”

Without thinking about it, Keith snorted. The comment was so odd that it threw him off guard. “I don’t get your thing with my size.”

“ _I_ don’t get how you got so much bigger and muscle-y-er when you were just stuck on the back of a space whale with questionable nutrition and resources for two years,” Lance defended. “And I don’t have a _thing_ about it. It’s just…still surprising.”

“It can’t be that surprising anymore. It’s been months since I came back.”

“I went years with you smaller and skinnier, give me a break, it’s out of my norm.”

Keith rolled his eyes, but he didn’t mean it unkindly. They fell into a nice silence as Keith looked out at the rest of the park, watching Lance’s cousins and younger siblings pass a soccer ball back and forth, using a small tree as their marker for a goal. Lance’s parents were off to the side, watching everything fondly and conversing. Where Coran had disappeared to, Keith didn’t know, but he saw Shiro and Allura in a discussion with Romelle and Lance’s aunt. Krolia was back at the shack still. She hadn’t wanted to intrude, despite how Lance tried to assure her she was always welcome with the McClains.

His ice cream was melted almost completely now, resembling the paste Lance had been playing with earlier, and yet he’d still barely touched any of it. Keith wasn’t the largest ice cream fan, but he understood why Lance chose it as his belated-birthday-party-dessert-of-choice; it was hot as hell today.

“You ever regret getting in that lion?” Lance spoke up suddenly. To Keith’s surprise, when he looked up, Lance was looking at him.

The question seemed important to him. Really important.

“What, when we first left Earth?” Keith asked. Lance nodded. “I…don’t know. No. I guess I don’t.”

He’d found his mom, his past. He’d helped taken down tyrants. He’d saved lives—made a difference. Found a purpose for being in this life. He was a part of Voltron, then a part of a rebel cause. He’d done more with his life since leaving Earth than he ever could’ve imagined doing had he stayed.

“Oh,” Lance said, and Keith knew that _no_ hadn’t been the answer Lance wanted to hear.

Keith wiped his hands on his thighs. “Do you?”

“Sometimes.”

The answer was a whisper, or something close to it, like the ghost of the word, half-there and half-dissolving in the space around them even as it was said. One of the kids playing soccer slipped and landed on his face, and one of the adults ran to his aid as the other children halted their game.

“Why?” Keith asked, although part of him already knew even as he opened his mouth.

“Because,” Lance started to answer. “Because…there’s just so…I missed so much. _We_ missed so much.” And then he laughed a second time, something about this conversation amusing to him. “Isn’t that so stupid? I miss so goddamn much while I’m billions of lightyears away and then I get back and suddenly the whole world, everything, is _too much_ for me.”

The kid started to cry. Someone bent down to comfort him.

“I don’t think it’s stupid,” Keith said.

“I wanted to be prom king,” Lance said. “Like, that was one thing I was actually stupidly into. It’s not even something anyone cares about once you’re out of high school, but I decided in sixth grade I was gonna be our classes prom king. And then I wasn’t even here for prom. We left a month before. God, that’s a dumb thing for me to be upset about, but we left a month before and now we’re back and everyone’s twenty fucking years old. Except you.”

Keith agreed, “Except me.”

“And the shit Veronica has told me! Kids I grew up with have their _own_ kids now! One of my exes from, like, middle school got pregnant right before graduation!”

“Are you—are you sad that you missed that?”

“I don’t know, maybe!” Lance threw his hands up in the air, exasperated, and accidentally knocked a hand against his bowl on the way. It made the spoon rattle around in the ceramic dish. “The point is we missed a lot.”

“Enough that you regret becoming a paladin?”

He sighed heavily. “No. Not at all. Just enough that I wish I…” He stopped. Keith watched him bite his lip, tugging the bottom one between his teeth. “I don’t know. I’m sorry, dude. I’m just talking about nothing at this point.”

“It’s not nothing.” But Keith didn’t know how to say _what_ it was. It was the first real, true conversation they’d had with each other in a long time. It was the first time he’d felt how stupidly, ridiculously, unnecessarily palpable the tension between them was. The first time he’d thought that maybe it was pointless to have that tension at all and just try to go back to how they were before Keith stopped being a paladin. The first time he’d allowed himself to get physically close to Lance since returning to Earth.

It was something Keith appreciated. It was genuine. Honest. It was something that made Keith aware, again, of how he’d enjoyed being Lance’s confidant, back when he could reasonably call himself that—how, even though he hated hearing that Lance was upset or insecure or anxious or angry, he liked the feeling of knowing Lance felt comfortable being real with him.

It was a lot of things. Certainly not _nothing_.

“It’s okay to be upset that you missed out on a lot of being a teenager,” Keith said. “Everyone wants to experience teenager shit at least a little, and we…were forced into a different position pretty early. It’s not bad if you feel like you had that taken from you.”

Lance stopped biting his lip, the skin there chapped. His lips were red now, vibrantly so, to the point where Keith wondered if he hadn’t accidentally peeled off skin and started some bleeding. He probably tasted like copper.

“When did you get smart?” Lance asked.

It broke Keith away from his thoughts about copper. Keith gave Lance an unimpressed look, to which Lance responded with a small, oddly sincere smile.

“Thanks, man,” Lance said. “I appreciate you comforting me.”

That’s what this was. Comforting. Consoling the grief of someone whose adolescence had died without them noticing, mourning the death of years that couldn’t be given back.

Keith nodded. He said, “I’m here any time.”

He hoped Lance knew how serious the offer was.


End file.
